Research

It has been a while since we had an acquisition in the database security space, but today Trustwave announced it acquired Application Security Inc. – commonly called “AppSec” by many who know the company. About 10 years ago I wrote my first competitive analysis paper during my employment with IPLocks, of our principal competitor: another little-known database security company called Application Security, Inc. Every quarter for four years, I updated those competitive analysis sheets to keep pace with AppSec’s product enhancements and competitive tactics in sales engagements. Little did I know I would continue to examine AppSec’s capabilities on a quarterly basis after having joined Securosis – but rather than solely looking at competitive positioning, I have been gearing my analysis toward how features map to the customer inquires, and tracking consumer experiences during proof-of-concept engagements. Of all the products I have tracked, I have been following AppSec the longest. It feels odd to be writing this for a general audience, but this deal is pretty straightforward, and it needed to happen. Application Security was one of the first database security vendors, and while they were considered a leader in the 2004 timeframe, their products have not been competitive for several years. AppSec still has one of the best database assessment products on the market (dbProtectAppDetectivePRO), and one of the better – possibly the best – database vulnerability research team backing it. But Database Activity Monitoring (DAM) is now the key driver in that space, and AppSec’s DAM product (AppDetectivePROdbProtect) has not kept pace with customer demand in terms of performance, integration, ease-of-use, or out-of-the-box functionality. A “blinders on” focus can be both admirable and necessary for very small start-ups to deliver innovative technologies to markets that don’t understand their new technology or value proposition, but as markets mature vendors must respond to customers and competitors. In AppSec’s early days, very few people understood why database security was important. But while the rest of the industry matured and worked to build enterprise-worthy solutions, AppSec turned a deaf ear to criticism from would-be customers and analysts. Today the platform has reasonable quality, but is not much more than an ‘also-ran’ in a very competitive field. That said, I think this is a very good purchase for Trustwave. It means several things for Trustwave customers: Trustwave has filled a compliance gap in its product portfolio – specifically for PCI. Trustwave is focused on PCI-DSS, and data and database security are central to PCI compliance. Web and network security have been part of their product suite, but database security has not. Keep in mind that DAM and assessment are not specifically prescribed for PCI compliance like WAF is; but the vast majority of customers I speak with use DAM to audit activity, discovery to show what data stores are being used, and assessment to prove that security controls are in place. Trustwave should have acquired this technology a while ago. The acquisition fits Trustwave’s model of buying decent technology companies at low prices, then selling a subset of their technology to existing customers where they already know demand exists. That could explain why they waited so long – balancing customer requirements against their ability to negotiate a bargain price. Trustwave knows what their customers need to pass PCI better than anyone else, so they will succeed with this technology in ways AppSec never could. This puts Trustwave on a more even footing for customers who care more about security and don’t just need to check a compliance box, and gives Trustwave a partial response to Imperva’s monitoring and WAF capabilities. I think Trustwave is correct that AppSec’s platform can help with their managed services offering – Monitoring and Assessment as a Service appeals to smaller enterprises and mid-market firms who don’t want to own or manage database security platforms. What does this mean for AppSec customers? It is difficult to say – I have not spoken with anyone from Trustwave about this acquisition, and I am unable to judge their commitment to putting engineering effort behind the AppSec products. And I cannot tell whether they intend to keep the research team which has been keeping the assessment component current. Trustwave tweeted during the official announcement that “.@Trustwave will continue to develop and support @AppSecInc products, DbProtect and AppDetectivePRO”, but that could be limited to features compliance buyers demand, without closing the performance and data collection gaps that are problematic for DAM customers. I will blog more on this as I get more information, but expect them to provide what’s required to meet compliance and no more. And lastly, for those keeping score at home, AppSec is the 7th Database Activity Monitoring acquisition – after Lumigent (BeyondTrust), IPLocks (Fortinet), Guardium (IBM), Secerno (Oracle), Tizor (IBM via Netezza), and Sentrigo (McAfee); leaving Imperva and GreenSQL as the last independent DAM vendors. Share:

Everyone has an opinion about security awareness training, and most of them are negative. Waste of time! Ineffective! Boring! We have heard them all. And the criticism isn’t wrong – much of the content driving security awareness training is lame. Which is probably the kindest thing we can say about it. But it doesn’t need to be that way. Actually, it cannot remain this way – there is too much at stake. Users remain the lowest-hanging fruit for attackers, and as long as that is the case attackers will continue to target them. Educating users about security is not a panacea, but it can and does help. It’s not like a focus on security awareness training is the flavor of the day for us. We have been talking about the importance of training users for years, as unpopular as it remains. The main argument against security training is that it doesn’t work. That’s just not true. But it doesn’t work for everyone. Like security in general, there is no 100%. Some employees will never get it – mostly because they just don’t care – but they do bring enough value to the organization that no matter what they do (short of a felony) they are sticking around. Then there is everyone else. Maybe it’s 50% of your folks, or perhaps 90%. Regardless of the number of employees who can be influenced by better security training content, wouldn’t it make your life easier if you didn’t have to clean up after them? We have seen training reduce the amount of time spent cleaning up easily avoidable mistakes. We are pleased to announce the availability of our Security Awareness Training Evolution paper. It discusses how training needs to evolve, and presents a path to improve training content and ensure the right support and incentives are in place for training to succeed. We would like to thank our friends at PhishMe for licensing this paper. Remember, it is through the generosity of our licensees that you get to read our stuff for this nifty price. Here is another quote from the paper to sum things up: As we have said throughout this paper, employees are clearly the weakest link in your security defenses, so without a plan to actively prepare them for battle you have a low chance of success. It is not about making every employee a security ninja – instead focus on preventing most of them from falling for simplistic attacks. You will still be exploited, but make it harder for attackers so you suffer less frequent compromise. Security-aware employees protect your data more effectively, it’s as simple as that, regardless of what you hear from naysayers. Check out the page in our Research Library, or download the Security Awareness Training Evolution (PDF) paper directly. Share:

I am still experimenting with posting research, from drafts through the editing process, on GitHub. No promises that we will keep doing this – it depends on the reaction we get. From a workflow standpoint it isn’t much more effort for us, but I like the radical transparency it enables. I just posted a second paper, which is still very much incomplete. I want to offer some instructions on how to edit or propose changes. This is just quick and dirty, and you should review the GitHub Help to really understand the process. GitHub is meant for code but works for any text files. Unlike any other option we found, GitHub offers an open, transparent way to not only collect feedback, but also to solicit and manage direct edits. Once you set it up the first time it is pretty easy – you subscribe, pull down a copy of the research, make your own edits, then send us a request to incorporate your changes into our master copy. Another nice feature is that GitHub tracks the entire editing process, including our internal edits. For transparency that’s sweet. I don’t expect many people to take advantage of this. I am currently the only Securosis Analyst doing it, and based on your feedback we will decide whether we should continue. Even if you don’t push changes or comments, let us know what you think. Here’s how: We will post all our research at https://github.com/Securosis. Right now I still need to move the Pragmatic Network Security Management project over there because I was still learning the process when I posted that one. For now you can find the research split between those two places. If you only want to leave a comment you can do so here on the blog post, or as an ‘Issue’ on GitHub. Blog comments can be anonymous but GitHub requires an account to create or edit an issue. Click ‘Issues’ and then simply add yours. If you want to actually make edits, go for it! To do this you need to both create a GitHub account and install the software. For you non-command-line types, you can download official GUI versions here. If you are running Linux git is probably already installed. If you try to use the git command under OS X 10.9 Mavericks, the system should install the software if necessary. Next, fork a copy of our repository. Go to https://github.com/Securosis, click the Fork button, and follow the instructions. That fork isn’t on your computer for editing yet, so synchronize your repository. This pulls down the key files to your system. On the web page click “Clone to Desktop”, it will launch your client, and you can choose where to save the fork. Edit away locally. This doesn’t affect our canonical version – just your fork of it. When you are done, commit your changes in your desktop GUI by clicking Changes, then Commit and Sync. Don’t forget to comment on your changes so we know why you submitted them. Then submit a pull request. This notifies us that you made changes. We will run through them and accept or decline. It is our research, after all. This is all new to us, so we need your feedback on whether it is worth continuing. We know many of you might be interested in tracking the research but not participating, and that’s fine, but if you don’t email or send us comments we won’t know you like it. Share:

It has been a while, but it is time to jump back into the Application Denial of Service series with both feet. As we described in the introduction, application denial of service can be harder to deal with than volume-based network DDoS because it is not always obvious what’s an attack and what’s legitimate traffic. Unless you are running all your traffic through a scrubbing center, your applications will remain targets for attacks that exploit the architecture, application stacks, business logic, and even legitimate functionality of the application. As we start digging into specific AppDoS tactics, we will start with attacks that target the server and infrastructure of your application. Given the popularity and proliferation of common application stacks, attackers can attack millions of sites with a standard technique, most of which have been in use for years. But not enough web sites have proper mitigations in place. Go figure. Server and infrastructure attacks are the low-hanging fruit of application denial of service, and will remain that so long as they continue to work. So let’s examine the various types of application infrastructure attacks and some basic mitigations to blunt them. Exploiting the Server Most attacks that directly exploit web servers capitalize on features of the underlying standards and/or protocols that run the web, such as HTTP. This makes many of these attacks very hard to detect because they look like legitimate requests – by the time you figure out it’s an attack your application is down. Here are a few representative attack types: Slowloris: This attack, originally built by Robert ‘RSnake’ Hansen, knocks down servers by slowly delivering request headers, forcing the web server to keep connections open, without ever completing the requests. This rapidly exhausts the server’s connection pool. Slow HTTP Post: Similar to Slowloris, Slow HTTP Post delivers the message body slowly. This serves the same purpose of exhausting resources on the web server. Both Slowloris and Slow HTTP Post are difficult to detect because their requests look legitimate – they just never complete. The R-U-Dead-Yet attack tool automates launching a Slow HTTP Post attack via an automated user interface. To make things easier (for your adversaries), RUDY is included in many penetration testing tool packages to make knocking down vulnerable web servers easy. Slow Read: Yet another variation of the Slowloris approach, Slow HTTP Read involves shrinking the response window on the client side. This forces the server to send data to the client slowly to stay within the response window. The server must keep connections open to ensure the data is sent, which means it can be quickly overwhelmed with connections. As with RUDY, these techniques are already weaponized and available for easy download and usage. You can expect innovative attackers to combine and automate these tactics into weapons of website destruction (as XerSeS has been portrayed). Regardless of packaging, these tactics are real and need to be defended against. Mitigating these server attacks typically requires a combination of web server configuration with network-based and application-based defenses. Keep in mind that ultimately you can’t really defend the application from these kinds of attacks because they are just taking advantage of web server protocols and architecture. But you can blunt their impact with appropriate controls. For example, Slowloris and Slow HTTP Post require tuning the web server to increase the maximum number of connections, prevent excessive connections from the same IP address, and allow a backlog of connection requests to be stored – to avoid losing legitimate application traffic. Network-based defenses on WAFs and IPSes can be tuned to look for certain web connection patterns and block offending traffic before the server becomes overwhelmed. The best approach is actually all of the above. Don’t just tune the web server or install network-based protection in front of the application – also build web applications to limit header and body sizes, and to close connections within a reasonable timeframe to ensure the connection pool is not exhausted. We will talk about building AppDoS protections into applications later in this series. An attack like Slow HTTP Read games the client side of the connection, requires similar mitigations. But instead of looking for ingress patterns of slow activity (on either the web server or other network devices), you need to look for this kind of activity on the egress side of the application. Likewise, fronting the web application with a CDN (content delivery network) service can alleviate some of these attacks, as your web application server is a step removed from the clients, and insulated from slow reads. For more information on these services, consult our Quick Wins with Website Protection Services paper. Brute Force Another tactic is to overwhelm the application server – not with network traffic, but by overloading application features. We will cover an aspect of this later, when we discuss search engine and shopping cart shenanigans. For now let’s look at more basic features of pretty much every website, such as SSL handshakes and serving common web pages like the login screen, password reset, and store locator. These attacks are so effective for overwhelming application servers because functions like SSL handshake and pages which require database calls are very compute intensive. Loading a static page is easy, but checking login credentials against the hashed database of passwords is a different animal. First let’s consider the challenges of scaling SSL. On some pages, such as the login page, you need to encrypt traffic to protect user credentials in motion. SSL is a requirement for such pages. So why is scaling SSL handshaking such an issue? As described succinctly by Microsoft in this Tech Bulletin, there are 9 distinct steps in establishing a SSL handshake, many of which require cryptographic and key generation operations. If an attacker uses a rented botnet to establish a million or so SSL sessions at the same time, guess what happens? It is not a bandwidth issue – it is a compute problem – and the application becomes unavailable because no more SSL